Friday, July 12, 2013

IN HINDSIGHT, maybe Joseph "Mousie" Massimino shouldn't have sent that
letter from his prison cell threatening that a "bald-headed
motherf-----" who owed him $35,000 would have nowhere to hide if he
didn't pay up.

And remember, when Massimino told his friends in
the courtroom to "keep those martini glasses chilled" so they could
party when he beat the latest charges?

That's not funny anymore.

Taunting
the assistant U.S. attorneys and calling an Asian prosecutor "Johnny
Chu" during the four-month racketeering trial was probably a mistake,
too.

Because all the things that make a mobster a mobster - the
swagger, the blasé attitude, the don't-make-me-hurt-you threats - look
really bad when the judge sits down to calculate your prison sentence.

Massimino,
63, the reputed ex-underboss of the Philadelphia Mafia, won't be having
a martini at least until his mid-70s. Yesterday, U.S. District Judge
Eduardo Robreno sentenced the wiry wiseguy with the graying goatee to
nearly 16 years in prison on a racketeering-conspiracy conviction.

"I
can only conclude that you just don't get it. You never got it,"
Robreno told the unrepentant jokester. "There is nothing before me that
bodes well for your future as a law-abiding citizen, despite all your
virtues and talents."

"I'm
no boss of nothing," Massimino insisted, saying that the government
should devote its resources to catching terrorists, not chasing South
Philly members of La Cosa Nostra.

"If they put the money and
manpower into al Qaeda that they put into my case, maybe the World Trade
Center would still be there, and people in Boston would have their
legs," he said, referring to the Boston Marathon bombing.

Friends
and family say Massimino is a swell guy. But his life story - the 1966
expulsion from St. John Neumann High School, followed by reams of police
reports, indictments and newspaper clippings - reads like a
Tolstoy-sized manual on how to get locked up. By the mid-1980s,
prosecutors say, Massimino had already notched 21 arrests and six felony
convictions.

"I think this finally puts a period at the end of
Massimino's long and sorry criminal career," said David Fritchey, chief
of the Organized Crime Strike Force in the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Assistant
U.S. Attorney Frank Labor told Robreno that it's "more likely that the
Tooth Fairy walks through that door than this defendant will be
rehabilitated."

Massimino's attorney, Joseph Santaguida, said
after the sentencing that much of the racketeering indictment was
"baloney" and described it as a glorified gambling case. It did not
include any homicides. Reputed mob boss Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi and
his nephew, George Borgesi, face a retrial in October.

The letter
Massimino penned in 2005 while in New Jersey's South Woods State Prison
ended up hurting him yesterday. In the letter, Massimino told a friend
to inform a debtor that "he better get my f------ money" and that the
debtor "won't be able to hide anywhere in the U.S." Toward the bottom,
Massimino warned his friend: "If you write me, watch what you say. They
read everything that comes to me."

Robreno ruled that the threat
constituted a crime of violence. He used it, along with other evidence
of extortion, to increase Massimino's prison term. With good behavior
and time served, Massimino could be out in about 11 years.